Thirty-five years after the Supreme Court unilaterally struck down state
laws restricting abortion, the cost of that decision continues to increase
our moral deficit, which will have far greater (and eternal) consequences
than the impact from economic challenges during a possible recession.

Depending on how one counts the number of abortions per year since 1973,
more than 50 million people who might have been are not. These were people
who, regardless of the circumstances of the women who carried them, had the
potential to contribute to the country and to the world. But now they
cannot, because they are not. Would we be fighting the battle over
immigration had we not rid ourselves of a generation of humans who likely
would have done the work for which we are now importing illegal aliens?
Actions have consequences.

Roe and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, took the question of endowment of
life by "our Creator" and placed it in the hands of individuals. History has
shown what happens when humanity seizes such power for itself: political
dictatorships, eugenics and scientific experiments unrestrained by any
moorings to a moral code. Each becomes her and his own god; each becomes a
taker of life, rather than a giver, inverting the creation model into one of
destruction and transforming the pregnant woman from life-giver to
life-taker.

The social restructuring unleashed by the judicial fiat that was Roe created
a cultural fissure that remains today. We moved quickly from acknowledgement
of a right to live, to assertions of a right to die. In her essay "The Women
of Roe v. Wade," Harvard professor Mary Ann Glendon calls to mind the
novelist Walker Percy who prophesied two years before Roe that "Qualitarian
Centers" would spring up, "where, as one of Percy's characters explained,
doctors would respect Œthe right of an unwanted child not to have to endure
a life of suffering.'" State governments, Percy suggested, might eventually
recognize a right to die. Arrangements would be made for the sick and
elderly to push a button that would transport them to a "happy death" in
Michigan, a "joyful exitus" in New York, or a "luanalu-hai" in Hawaii.
Percy's fiction increasingly resembles fact.

Abortion on demand cannot be seen in isolation from social breakdown. In
1973, near the end of the Vietnam War and the approaching resignation of
President Nixon two years later, the focus on self, pleasure and convenience
by Baby Boomers was at its height. Marriages easily dissolved as "no fault"
divorce laws were passed; cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births were on the
rise; "unwanted babies" (who were labeled "products of conception" to make
it easier to deny the obvious) became an impediment to the pursuit of
pleasure and material gain.

Abortion was not a cause, but a reflection of our decadence and deviancy.
One does not begin to kill babies until other dominos have fallen. And once
they have fallen, it becomes difficult to set them aright because to do so
would require an admission of something so horrible that those responsible
for this fetal holocaust would have to acknowledge their sin and repent of
it. Such a thing is not a character trait of this most pampered generation.

In recent years there have been signs that things may be - if not turning
around - then moderating. According to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, abortion numbers have declined steadily since 1990, from a high
of 1.2 million annually to fewer than 900,000. This is due, I believe, to
the unrelenting commitment of the pro-life movement through pregnancy help
centers, information by Internet, marches and what appears to be a growing
pro-life consensus among many women who reject the cavalier attitudes about
life displayed by their mothers' feminist generation.

Hollywood has infused a pro-life subplot into films such as "Juno" and
"Knocked Up." Might the "old-fashioned" become the new fashion?

Politicians and judges could help bury Roe by requiring that pregnant women
receive complete information about the nature of the life within them,
including being required to view sonograms before electing abortion. This
would follow truth-in-labeling and truth-in-lending laws by fully informing
and empowering women. Such an approach would satisfy the liberal demand to
keep abortion "safe and legal" and the pro-life desire to make them rare.
After 35 years of slaughtering our young, isn't it time to stop? That child
born in 1973 could be a parent now. There are children who could have been
born today. Thirty-five years of killing has diminished and corrupted us
all. Let's summon the moral courage to stop it for our sake and for
theirs.